TeX Live is an easy way to get up and running with the TeX document production system. It provides a comprehensive TeX system with binaries for most flavors of Unix, including GNU/Linux, and also Windows. It includes all the major TeX-related programs, macro packages, and fonts that are free software, including support for many languages around the world.

Since September 12, 2008, TeX Live packages have been available in [extra] for both architectures, hence replacing the obsolete teTeX. Packages for the 2009 release of TeX Live have been available since early September 2009 (thus before the official upstream release). By installing the packages Template:Package Official and its dependency Template:Package Official, you will have a very solid and bleeding-edge typesetting system at your disposal!

Important information

The way to handle font mappings for updmap has been improved in Sept. 2009, and installation should now be much more reliable than in the past. In the meanwhile, if you encounter error messages about unavailable map file, simply remove them by hand from the Template:Filename file (ideally using Template:Codeline). You can also run Template:Codeline to automatically comment out outdated map lines from the config file.

The ConTeXt formats (for MKII and MKIV) are not automatically generated upon installation. See the ConTeXT wiki for instructions on how to do this.

TeX Live (upstream) now provides a tool for incremental updates of CTAN packages. On that basis, we also plan to update our packages on a regular basis (we have written tools that almost automate that task).

A skeleton of a local texmf tree is at Template:Filename: this directory is writable for members of the group tex.

Paper Size

American users are advised to run

texconfig

in order to set the default page size to "Letter", as opposed to A4, the current default. This command is also capable of changing other useful settings. Not changing this setting can result in slightly flawed output, as the right margin will be bigger than the left.

Error with "formats not generated" upon update

See this bug report. (Note that if you don't use the experimental engine LuaTeX, you can ignore this.) This situation typically occurs when the configuration files language.def and/or language.dat for hyphenation patterns contain references to files from earlier releases of texlive-core, in particular to the latest experimental hyphenation patterns for German, whose file name changes frequently. Currently they should point to Template:Filename.

Fonts

By default, the fonts that come with the various TeX Live packages are not automatically available to fontconfig. If you want to use them with, say XeTeX or OpenOffice, the easiest approach is to make symlinks as follows:

Note: This may cause conflicts with XeTeX/XeLaTeX if the same fonts are (separately) available to both TeX and fontconfig, i.e. if multiple copies of the same font are available on the search path.

List of all texlive-* packages

The texlive packages are arranged into two groups: texlive-most and texlive-lang
(NB: the groups texlive-most-doc and texlive-lang-doc are provided in community).

The essential package texlive-core contains the basic texmf-dist tree, while texlive-bin contains the binaries, libraries, and the texmf tree. texlive-core is based on the “medium” install scheme of the upstream distribution. All other packages are based on the eponymous collections in TeXLive. To determine which CTAN packages are included in each package, lookup the files

Usage: tllocalmgr
tllocalmgr [options] [command] [args]
Running tllocalmgr alone starts the TeXLive local manager shell
for Arch Linux. This shell is capable of command-line completion!
There you can look at the available updates with the command 'status'
and you can install individual CTAN packages using 'install' or 'update'
under $TEXMFLOCAL. This is done by creating a package texlive-local-<pkg>
and installing it with pacman. Note that this won’t interfere with your
standard texlive installation, but files under $TEXMFLOCAL will take
precedence.
Here are the commands available in the shell:
Commands:
status -- Current status of TeXLive installation
shortinfo * -- Print a one-liner description of CTAN packages
info * -- Print info on CTAN packages
update * -- Locally update CTAN packages
install * -- Locally install new CTAN packages
installdoc * -- Locally install documentation of CTAN packages
installsrc * -- Locally install sources of CTAN packages
listfiles * -- List all files in CTAN packages
search * -- Search info on CTAN packages
searchfiles * -- Search for files in CTAN packages
texhash -- Refresh the TeX file database
clean -- Clean local build tree
help -- Print helpful information
quit -- Quit tllocalmgr
The commands followed by * take one of more package names as arguments.
Note that these can be completed automatically by pressing TAB.
You can also run tllocalmgr as a standard command-line program, with
one of the above commands as argument, then the corresponding task will
be performed and the program will exit (except when the command is 'status').
tllocalmgr accepts the following options:
Options: --help Shows this help
--version Show the version number
--forceupdate Force updating the TeXLive database
--skipupdate Skip updating the TeXLive database
--localsearch Search only installed packages
--location #TODO?
--mirror CTAN mirror to use (default is mirror.ctan.org)
--nocolor #TODO

Recent "langukenglish" errors

For issues involving this error when trying to run tllocalmgr commands,

Can't get object for collection-langukenglish at /usr/bin/tllocalmgr line 103

Manually installing .sty files

Normally, new .sty files go ~/texmf/tex/latex/<package name>/*. Create this directory if you do not have it. This directory will automatically be searched when *tex is executed. Further discussion can be found at http://bbs.archlinux.org/viewtopic.php?id=85757.

Installing .sty using PKGBUILDs

To install a latex package on a global level you should use a PKGBUILB for the sake of simplicity and maintenance. Look at this example.

Alternative: TeX Live network install

A discussion of the pros and cons of making the TeX Live network install.

See also

For frequently asked qustions about TeX, TeXLive, and how it is packaged on arch, see the TeX Live FAQ. For basic information on LaTeX see LaTeX. If you are interested in using CJK (Chinese, Japanese, Korean) characters, see TeX Live and CJK